About side projects

There is something about writing code for me and no one else.

It just feels different, it feels great.

Handcrafting a tool, that serves me exactly how I want.

It may be similar as composing a song.

For the past few weeks I’ve been working on a side project to generate slides from markdown. To be honest, I did nothing I just added a UI to existing tools I’ve been using. I’ve been teching Rails for a few years now. Two years ago I decided to revamp my slides and gave reveal.js a try. I fell in love.

Reveal.js is an amazing tool to create slides—not only from markdown. It has lots of configurations available, the speaker view is just fantastic, adding notes work just fine, vertical and horizontal slides served me very well to group topics in my lectures, and given it’s just HTML everything is easy to further customize.

These slides were written in Markdown and built with reveal.js—the script used can be found here.

In addition to that, after preparing a written document for a course I was taking in the university, the teachers asked us to present the work. Given we had already written the document in markdown, we only removed little bits and used reveal.js to create a presentation. The presentation was simple and nice, everything we needed to talk about the work done.

We used Pandoc to generate the PDF first. It used the markdown as source. And turns out Pandoc also supports reveal.js as an output format. Nice.

Eventually, this side project will not only support generating slides from markdown, but also a printable PDF files or ebooks or any other format I may need.

Who knows, maybe in time it becomes a ~~side~~ main project.

For now, I’ll keep spending my days writing code and tests, but at nights only writing code.

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